“They just eat so much,” says David Ullrich, executive director of the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Cities Initiative. “They’re like the locusts of the river.”

That’s what makes them so dangerous to the lakes. Asian carp aren’t direct predators, but they eat plankton, which knocks out the bottom layers of the food chain. If they were to successfully establish themselves in the Great Lakes and start breeding, they could utterly disrupt the existing ecosystem, potentially starving out the trout and other native fish that make the Great Lakes a tourism hot spot.

Estimates put the Great Lakes sport and commercial fishery at $2.5 to $7 billion. While the loss of this would be a terrible shame, the thought that one day you wouldn’t see photos like this of a parent and child enjoying Michigan’s amazing fishery seems worse to me.

Rob feels this is one of the best photos he’s ever taken. Check it out bigger and in his slideshow.

And if you can, make sure you write your representatives to tell them how important it is to stop the Asian carp in Chicago!

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